


new high score

by 264feet



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Car Accidents, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Narrator Chara, Past Child Abuse, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route, Reader Is Frisk, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 01:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10776171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/264feet/pseuds/264feet
Summary: Three weeks after the barrier is broken, they recover bits and pieces of Papyrus from the highway and you know for the first time that monsters aren't destined for freedom.





	new high score

Three weeks after the barrier is broken, they recover bits and pieces of Papyrus from the highway and you know for the first time that monsters aren't destined for freedom.   
  
The news comes on a sunny afternoon. Kids continue to play catch outside even as the firetrucks and ambulances race past. Fluffy white clouds continue to float along even as plumes of black smoke rise from the scene of the crash. The world enjoys its last few seconds before being cast back-- after all, this is the furthest point in time it's reached yet.   
  
Nobody was sure it was Papyrus who died at first. The live news footage showed what looked like his red car but lots of people had that type of car, and his cell went straight to voicemail but he never answered the phone when driving or working. But you knew it was him because this is the fourth time it's happened. But he's only fatally crashed once, of course. It only happens once per timeline, always the same hour on the same day.   
  
Even now, after having dated Papyrus and hung out with Papyrus and fought Papyrus and killed Papyrus and spared Papyrus and called Papyrus and warned Papyrus, after walking down Ebott hand-in-hand with your new friends while already formulating a plan on how to save Papyrus for real this time, the longest you have managed to keep him alive past his 'expiration date' isn't more than a few minutes. You hear the exact number in your head as you reset and find yourself on your back again, bandages hugging reopened wounds and stick laying next to you: _seventeen minutes,_ says Chara, awoken again against their will. _A new record._   
  
Behind every reset are countless hours of negotiation and mercy and pain and befriending, not to mention countless deaths (but not all of them yours)-- and the most that all that time and effort has ever culminated into is 17 minutes. For comparison, that's how long it once took you to watch red run down the sink, bandage your wound, grab a stick from the yard and sprint up Ebott without looking back.   
  
You lay on your back for a time, trying to figure out what you'll do this time. It feels as if you've exhausted your options. Once, you emphasized the importance of car safety to the skeleton. No change; the accident wasn't his fault, no matter how hard you tried to prevent it. The next time, you scared him out of getting a car. Instead, he took the bus and the 18-wheeler crashed into it head-on. The next time, you urged him to get a different job so he never had to take that highway, but traffic for some reason was closed on his usual route so he had to take a detour that he would never complete. It's as if a happy ending is dangled in front of you like a carrot to a donkey, but no matter how fast you run or how how close you get, the carrot was never there to begin with.   
  
(But run, you determined ass. Run.)   
  
His voicemail message still plays in your head even among a bed of golden flowers, long before you get your phone. They must have called him a dozen times-- even after losing hope that he might be alive, just to hear his voice one last time. You had been hiding just beyond the door with your own phone clutched in your hand as Toriel broke into sobs and Sans buried his face in his hands and Undyne dialed the number over and over again with increasing fury and desperation each time.   
  
_CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE REACHED THE VOICEMAIL OF THE GREAT PAPYRUS, CAPTAIN OF THE ROYAL GUARD! LEAVE YOUR MESSAGE AFTER THE BEEP!_ he would say, his voice still proud and excited and completely unaware of the death that waited just around the corner.   
  
"Papyrus," you had whispered to the voicemail, "do you want to die so badly?"   
  
No, of course he didn't, he wasn't you, but it's happened so many times now. You can't just let him die, but it's started to seem like the lesser of two evils. Past runs were worse. In another timeline, monsters didn't last a week before an angry armed mob brutally beat and killed Asgore in the street. Riots erupted like wildfire after the incident and the unrest led to what some began calling 'the second war of humans and monsters'.  
  
You were so shaken. It was supposed to end happily, wasn't it? Hadn't you worked hard enough? Hadn't you been determined enough? So why did things still turn out badly? Even once you reset and wiped clean all memories of the incident, why did Flowey still comment when he met you that he swore he heard multiple bodies falling into the Underground rather than just you?   
  
You studied politics far too hard for a child like you to comprehend and learned to negotiate better through your blood and tears and took more verbal abuse than even you were used to in order to secure monsters a good home outside of Ebott. You ensured that no monster walk alone at night and requested that Asgore maintain a low public profile and encouraged Toriel to take the helm more than she already did.   
  
You had tried to encourage Asgore to be kind but to be willing to defend himself, too, but he forgot these words even before you did a reset. No matter how the humans beat him he simply smiled and refused to fight back. To this day you're not sure how you've managed to save him in repeated timelines other than ignoring Papyrus and the others right up until the crash.   
  
Now, as you stand on the brink of doing it all again, you begin to realize the only reason you stay with Toriel after the barrier breaks is watch over the monsters the way they had promised to guard you. They can't help you, not really, because none of them dare question why you climbed up a mountain from which nobody returned. And you can't help them, because no matter which factors you control for and how hard you work to protect them, it seems as if monsters were always fated for disaster.  
  
\---  
  
Your smiles become more mechanical and your words more practiced; you autopilot entire runs through the Underground while performing calculations in your head on how to win the real battle that lies ahead, or maybe while just dissociating. It occurs to you once that the missing factor may be Asriel-- how could it be a 'happy ending' if not everyone made it out of the Underground?   
  
It takes a lot of coaxing and a promise across your soul that you won't reveal his identity to anyone, but at the end of your next run, you're able to convince Flowey to come with you to the surface. His reaction to the sunlight is far less than you expected; he simply squints against it, seemingly retracts further into himself, and makes a muffled comment about how 'they would have liked to be here for this'. You dare not tell him that they never follow you to the surface, because they liked being with you the first time but what they want more than anything else now is to die, not just stuff buttercups in their mouth but die for real and move on to the next world, but you cannot let that happen because you're nothing short of incompetent without them.   
  
Even the mountain is silent as you climb down. You've even memorized exactly how to make it down the bumpy path without misplacing a single stone or making a sound at all-- sharply contrasting your climb up, characterized by barreling through low branches and slipping on vines.   
  
Everyone takes decently enough to Flowey, or at least they try. He proves remarkably observant as always, telling you exactly how many people passed the house and what their biggest fear likely was, not to mention how easily he could exploit it. He doesn't eat dinner with the family but accepts water every so often, and he doesn't go outside but he spends a lot of time on a sunny windowsill, just staring, just thinking. Alone.    
  
("Why did you want me here so badly?"  
  
"Because I care about you."  
  
"Did everyone you care about want you dead?"  
  
Essentially, yes, far beyond even just the ones in this house.)   
  
You talk to him, or at least you try to since he usually just ignores you. Sometimes you try to egg him on to taunt you like he used to; it's strange, but you kind of miss when he laughed at you and mocked you and always had a sinister plot in mind. Even when he talks about the greatest fears of those outside he doesn't say it with any interest in his voice; it's just an activity to keep his mind occupied because you know more than anyone that there's nothing worse than when a busy mind goes quiet.   
  
Sometimes you just sit and talk for what feels like hours on end, everything from what happened at school to how scared you are. He doesn't say anything but he listens, and in these timelines when you mechanically laugh at the same jokes with your friends and shop around with your friends knowing Papyrus will always pick the same car to die in, that's enough.   
  
("I feel so alone," you say, but you don't mention that you always had a companion in the Underground. "I feel like I try to connect with people but I don't understand anyone anymore."   
  
He just cracks a small grin, as if he knew all along this would happen to someone besides just he.)   
  
Many days pass without him saying a word, and after a time you begin to take him in his pot on walks around the neighborhood. You encourage others to spend time with him while you're at school. He lets Alphys recite her lab notes to him in order to figure out where the mistake is by proxy of just reading them aloud. He uses a little vine with a rag to dry the dishes that Toriel cleans. He even lets Asgore change his sandy, low-quality soil to high-end fertilizer.   
  
But despite all the nurturing and growth, it's nothing against the toxins in the air. 'Asriel loved that,' they say. 'Asriel would have done this.' 'Asriel used to say that.'   
  
("Don't let it bother you," you urge. "Everyone else likes you the way you are."   
  
"I know you just brought me up here because you wanted me to turn back into him, right?" he says, using his voice for the first time in ages. His voice is cracked and weak. "That's your idea of a 'happy ending'. It doesn't matter what anyone else wants.")   
  
You stop pressuring him to 'get better' but his leaves still start to wilt and his petals slowly droop. Bags form under his eyes. He doesn't look out the window anymore but you tell him who passes outside the house and what you think their biggest fear would be, but none of them are as terrifying as what's happening right in front of you.   
  
He doesn't accept your water anymore, but he doesn't comment when you sneak some into his soil in the middle of the night. You come home from school and find the curtains closed no matter how wide you left them open for him.   
  
You had secretly hoped that he could figure out a way to avoid the car crash and help assimilate monsters and humans and avoid any future disasters with you, because he was clever and it would keep his mind busy, but no matter how many times you asked him he just said it would be reset soon anyway.   
  
Once, he says something to you before you go to your bedroom for the night.  
  
"Don't worry," he says, "nobody you love has to die."   
  
You don't sleep easily after that as you're tossed like a ship on a stormy sea between dreams of comforting a fading Asriel and being torn apart by Omega Flowey and remembering a child falling into the Underground being helped up by their new best friend.  That morning is one day before Papyrus's car crash and you hear a crunch and then a deafening silence. You race down from your bedroom, traffic reports and car safety papers flying, and see him facing the out the kitchen window. You call his name but no response comes. When you turn the pot around, you see no face, no false smile, no weary eyes; it's just a regular flower, wilted with its stem half-snapped as if hit by multiple magic bullets. But nobody was home except for him, and you know from being hit by those friendliness pellets more than once exactly what type of damage they do.   
  
(When you reset, he launches right into his 'friendliness pellet' spiel without a clue in the world and gasps in confusion as you embrace him and begin to sob.)  
  
\---  
  
Flowey does better remaining in the Underground; it takes you a lot of coaxing from a voice in your head to let him be, that your plan wasn't always the best plan. You and Papyrus visit him sometimes with pie he nibbles at and stories he listens to until you and the skeleton leave. As he drives you home you can't help but stare out the window and think that the factor which is ruining everything isn't the absence of Asriel but the presence of yourself.  
  
You forgot how lonely the weeks were without the flower. You again manage to save Asgore's life but your fingers still ache from words you've not yet written and your voice is sore from words you've not yet spoken. Monsters live segregated from humans but you still live with Toriel because you're not sure what you qualify as.    
  
The day of the incident, you run out of strategies and simply ask Papyrus to stay home on the day of the accident, half-expecting the truck to crash directly into your house. You had tried to coax him with tears but find that they dried out that last reset. It's with a sinking feeling in your gut that you realize you don't know why you're trying to save him, why you're trying to save anyone; you might have loved them once, but now you feel nothing toward them but frustration and a stubborn refusal to just quit that some might praise as 'determination'.  
  
Regardless, you manage to get him to stay home from work and you watch the report of the highway accident on the news together. You let out a sigh of relief but don't actually feel accomplished that night, standing over his bed and watching him sleep. 'Alive', it was such an abstract category for you now. Was he really alive if he had died so many times before? Did his soul go to heaven only for you to keep ripping it back down to hell? Why did you think you had the right to play with his life like this, especially when you had killed him before?  
  
It had seemed like the best option at the time. It was an act of mercy for you to kill all monsters down in the dark rather than let them burn up in the light. You made each of their deaths swift and painless; you collected their dust and spread them on what you knew they loved most from hundreds and hundreds of resets past. But you had stopped right before the absolute, not because you didn't think this was the best option, but because you didn't know what your selfish soul would do if you couldn't keep experimenting with how long you could make them last on the cruel surface from which you fell.   
  
You sleep that night with your sins crawling on your back, your blanket soaked from your sweat and twisted from your tossing and turning. You're proud you saved him but at the same time you're wracked with anxiety. In the Underground you could control for just about any variable, you could map dialogue and pattern behavior, but there was too much to predict in the big wide world. And every time something went wrong, you knew you couldn't just load back at a save point halfway through; you'd have to live with Toriel and jape with Papyrus and lie down with Napstablook and run from Undyne and befriend Alphys and dance with Mettaton and fight Asgore and act surprised when, at the end of it all, Asriel showed his face as if it were the first time.   
  
"You aren't really Chara, are you?" Asriel would ask. The first time you told him your name, it was with enthusiasm and love. The tenth time, you mumbled it so quietly he couldn't hear. The hundredth time, you couldn't speak anymore and spelled each letter individually in sign language with shaking hands and aching fingers.   
  
Your 'happy ending' was fundamentally flawed to begin with. The six souls never received their closure after dying down in the dark and Flowey never thrived even if he survived in the Underground and Chara fell into an uneasy slumber rather than truly moving on when you saw the daylight again, as if knowing full well that they would be narrating the same actions for you soon enough. Sometimes you wonder if you start over again just so you can hear them one more time, so you can be sure of what you're doing and you can check every last thing to hear them say it.   
  
You might try to urge them to stay. But you can picture them wilting just as Flowey did, watching their family happy with their replacement and the world turn without them. Their purpose was fulfilled, but you have nothing better to do.   
  
"You aren't really Chara, are you?" Asriel would ask. And you know you're not, even when their memories play in your head and their sadness weighs down your heart, because if you were, you would really know what to do.   
  
\---  
  
It was hard to tell who a monster was in life when all you can see is their dust, but you can distinctly tell this one was Alphys. It's strange to run your finger through the coarse material; you've never killed her before directly, but you've been able to do things that lead to her death. The lightning strike, though, you could never control for.   
  
It happened on a day that was mostly clear. She was at the beach for monsters. There was a rumble in the sky. She said it was dangerous. Undyne said just a little longer.   
  
You spend your last night in this timeline trying to figure out what to do. You can't warn Alphys because she was already anxious enough. You can't tell them to go to another beach because the monster-human mixed beach wouldn't open unless you were better as ambassador and you barely have the energy to stop Asgore's murder. Even if they could go to another beach, there's no guarantee death won't find her there, like it did so many times for Papyrus.   
  
And now that Papyrus has lived past his expiration date he's started to find misery in his new job; he either blends into the background or is forced back in by bigotry and fear when he tries to stand out. You verge on tears when he tries to take his car but he doesn't understand why. He's quiet for a month about not receiving any pay for his work yet because he's sure it's fine, he's sure his boss has the best intentions and doesn't understand why anyone wouldn't be honest with him and Toriel and Sans give each other guilty looks about putting him in charge of the now-disbanded 'royal guard'.  
  
You hear Toriel writing letters and organizing events late until the night but it's she who scorns you when you confront her because you're supposed to be the one getting sleep. You beg Asgore to stay home from the peace rally and his absence causes strain in his already-troubled relationship with Toriel, who accuses him of doing nothing to atone for his slaughtering six children, and speaking of which, you swear you still see familiar faces on missing posters but can't place them.   
  
It becomes lonelier going all the way up until the event on the surface that went wrong. You can't fake laughing at their jokes anymore. You tell stories to the empty flower pot that you once kept Flowey in but it doesn't feel the same. When you sleep you dream of your voice shouting in rage and of the other child's terrified screams, of blood on your hands and of defeating the enemy and becoming strong. You dream about the child you attacked, the one who made fun of your father who drank a lot and your mom who got sad a lot and how you always smelled like you hadn't showered in days because you couldn't, the one who told the whole school you ate food out of the garbage because the only thing in your lunchbox was a stale quiche and note that you had read a hundred times.   
  
It hadn't been long since you fell and rose again. You live on the opposite side of the mountain now, as far away from your old life as you've ever been, but you leave the house less and less in growing fear that they'll find you. But if they do, there's really no chance they could say anything to you that you haven't told yourself already.  
  
(If anything goes wrong, you'll just reset again anyway. Then you can relive your only accomplishment, you can feel like a hero for a time and not tell them how many times you've thrown your gold medal to the mud and forced them to give it to you again.)   
  
\---  
  
Your 'high score' grows inverse to your mental health; monsters survive for months once, then two seasons, then a full year. You can tell based on how many of your ribs show.    
  
They get a little time of fresh air and sunshine but you've lived dozens of lifetimes doing it over and over, forcing yourself into a sick penance over even the slighest of faults. No longer does Papyrus crash in his car but you reset when Toriel trips down the stairs and breaks her wrist. No longer does Asgore die a martyr but you reset when he moves across to the opposite side of town from Toriel. No longer does Flowey commit suicide but you reset when you see a bed of golden flowers and think maybe this time, this one run, you could find a way to bring back Asriel and then Toriel and Asgore could be friends again and monster assimilation would go smoother and your friends would all be happier and you could finally, finally just stop.   
  
\---  
  
"It seems everyone is quite eager to set off," Toriel says.   
  
You give a content sigh, pretending it's because of the view from the mountain and not because this period is a break during which you know that no monster will die. She turns to you. "Frisk... you came from this world, right...? So you must have a place to return to, do you not? What will you do?"   
  
You open your mouth to speak but find no words. Seeing monsters make their way down the mountain towards the horizon, you remember for once that you loved them. When you first fell, you were lost and terrified. They showed you love, even if most of them kind of tried to kill you; they gave you laughs and puzzles and kindness that you had never received before.  
  
"I have places to go." It's the first time you say these words, and the disappointment on her face hurts more than any of the fates that have befallen them. But she quickly replaces it with a smile.   
  
"Ah... I see. I hope I am not keeping you."   
  
She turns her back towards you. She looks back once. If only she knew this was for the best, you think. Maybe without you, Asgore will be killed and Papyrus will crash and who knows what else will happen. Maybe without you, Asgore won't underestimate his importance in negotiating peace and Papyrus will somehow avoid that accident anyway, or maybe none of that will happen. But you have to let them go. It's a strong feeling you have now; after resetting so many times in the Underground, you began to think of their fate as your responsibility, your toy. Maybe without your controlling nature, they'll survive on their own. After all, monster society made it far without you for a long time before you fell.   
  
Even if many tears were shed and many wounds were opened again and again, if that didn't happen, would you still be here with Toriel right now? No, you know as well as anyone that the storm can cause the sunlight that shines afterwards to look twice as bright. It's a story written on your body in blue bruises and broken smiles.   
  
She begins to walk away, faster now, and stops with a gasp as you grab the back of her robe. It's almost with relief you note that there are tears in your eyes again. She might try to reach out to you but you know somehow that this is the last time you'll ever see her.  You embrace her and apologize, just saying sorry over and over again as if you might be able to make up for every wrong you've caused her and all of them over all your resets.   
  
"Frisk... you have nothing to apologize for," she says unknowingly. You like to believe in your heart that is true. As you climb down the mountain, heading in the opposite direction of everyone else, you like to believe you shouldn't apologize right now for giving up when your only redeeming factor was your inability to do just that. But as you look towards the sky and feel a lightness in your chest as if someone deep inside your mind has finally moved on, you think, just for a moment, that this run might be the one that lasts.


End file.
